Dave Alexander - Special Guest for Solar Week Spring 2008 -
Rice University

I am currently the Andrew Hays Buchanan Associate Professor of Astrophysics and a tenured Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Rice University in Houston, Texas. My main area of research is solar astrophysics with an emphasis on solar energetic phenomena, solar magnetic fields, and the solar atmosphere. My solar research has ranged from the theoretical modeling of high-energy gamma ray emission and hard X-ray emission in flares, through observational data analysis of UV/EUV/Soft X-ray coronal emissions, to the 3D simulation and modeling of active region coronae. This research has encompassed the physics of flare and CME initiation and energization, the interpretation of imaging and spectroscopic data, coronal loop modeling, and coronal heating. I have also worked outside of the solar regime with my PhD research in relativistic cosmology and, more recently, with the study of stellar activity cycles using the Sun as a benchmark, and the design of space mission concepts to study reconnection in the Earth’s magnetosphere.

I received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from the President of the United States in 2004 and was appointed a Kavli Frontiers Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. I am a funded co-investigator on the NASA STEREO mission and an Associated scientist on the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) mission to be launched at the end of 2008. I am an associate editor of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Science and I serve, or have served, on several national advisory committees for NASA, the American Geophysical Union, and for the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society.

Prior to joining the faculty at Rice in 2003 I worked as a Staff Physicist at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto California where we were responsible for the design and development of instruments for new space missions such as TRACE, STEREO, Hinode and SDO.

While at LMSAL, I developed an internal research program to explore the application of solar sail propulsion to novel solar-terrestrial missions.  I have worked on the design of several mission concepts utilizing solar sails to access new vantage points or high energy orbits.  I developed a magnetospheric mission concept called GeoSail which uses a solar sail to precess an earth-centered elliptical orbit in order to maintain long residence time in the reconnection region of the geomagnetic tail.  Together with collaborators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. and University of Glasgow and scientists at UC Berkeley we have created a complete end-to-end mission design for this concept.

Our solar sail research continues with a joint project with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to define the mission characteristics (science objectives, instrument suite, sail properties, mission trajectory and spacecraft) for the Solar Polar Imager. The SPI is designed to orbit the Sun at a high inclination 0.5 AU orbit in order to observe the detailed magnetic and radiative properties of the solar poles.